About Oracle Beehive

Oracle Beehive is the next generation of Oracle's enterprise collaboration technologies. Oracle Beehive provides a unified collaboration application and platform comprised of a comprehensive set of integrated, Java-based services, offering a new paradigm for enterprise collaboration solutions.

Oracle Beehive provides the full range of collaborative services for enterprise users, including:

E-mail

Time management

Instant messaging

Content and document management

Task management

Discussion forums

Search

Voicemail

Contact management

Mobile device support

Online presence

The following terms and concepts form the foundation of the Oracle Beehive system, enabling many of the collaboration-based features that it provides:

Oracle Beehive Service and Service Instances – Oracle Beehive offers discrete, function-specific services that interoperate seamlessly to provide a wide range of features for enterprise collaboration, compliance, third-party component connectivity, coexistence, and so on. In Oracle Beehive, the term service instance refers to a single instantiation of a service on a particular server. The term service typically refers to the collection of all instances of a particular service across all of the servers that host them. In Enterprise Manager, an Oracle Beehive service is called an Oracle Beehive Application and an Oracle Beehive service instance is called an Oracle Beehive Application instance.

Site – A site is a collection of physical hardware in the same geographic location used to run Oracle Beehive. Each Oracle Beehive site requires a minimum set of components to support a fully-functioning system. However, within each site, multiple instances of a variety of supported components, including services and servers, can be implemented.

Workspace – A workspace is both a virtual location and a container that provides Oracle Beehive users a place to collaborate, and enables them to create, view, store, access, and manage the artifacts related to their collaborations. From the user perspective, workspaces appear in supported Oracle Beehive clients.

Using Grid Control for Monitoring Oracle Beehive Targets

Enterprise Manager helps you monitor Oracle Beehive components in your enterprise. You can discover Oracle Beehive components in your environment and add them to Grid Control for central monitoring and management. Enterprise Manager Agents will discover and monitor Oracle Beehive sites, services, and service instances. In Grid Control Oracle Beehive sites, services (called applications), and service instances (called application instances) have home pages.

Following are the target types defined for Oracle Beehive in Grid Control:

Site – A site is a top-level container for Oracle Beehive deployment in a particular geographic location.

CalDAV Application and CalDAV Application Instance – Oracle Beehive CalDAV Service supports and manages all time management-related features and settings that the system leverages over the Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV) protocol. Enterprise Manager collects monitoring metrics from all Oracle Beehive CalDAV service instances. These represent metrics for CalDAV application instances. The metrics from instances are aggregated for CalDAV application metrics. Enterprise Manager also collects Configuration parameters for CalDAV application.

Presence Application and Presence Application Instance – Oracle Beehive Presence application supports and manages all aspects of user and resource presence for Oracle Beehive. Presence is the ability to detect and identify the status of a user or resource, and then display that status to other users and resources.

PushMail Application and PushMail Application Instance – Oracle Beehive Mobile Mail application manages the features and settings related to push mail for supported mobile devices. The Mobile Push application enables communication between device-resident, device management clients, and the Oracle Beehive Device Management application. The Mobile Push application also manages the features and settings that are related to the delivery of notifications to supported mobile devices.

Time Management Application and Time Management Application Instance – Oracle Beehive Time Management application supports all aspects of time and task management, as well as user and resource scheduling for Oracle Beehive. The Time Management application maintains and provides access to the latest schedule information for all Oracle Beehive users and resources.

WebDAV Application and WebDAV Application Instance – Oracle Beehive WebDAV application supports and manages all content management-related features and settings that the system leverages over the Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol.

Voice Message Application and Voice Message Application Instance – Oracle Beehive Voicemail application supports all aspects of voicemail and fax management for Oracle Beehive. The Voicemail Service can be leveraged by the E-mail Service, enabling delivery of voicemail messages and faxes as e-mail.

Workspaces Application and Workspaces Application Instance – Oracle Beehive Workspace application supports all the features and functionality provided by Oracle Beehive personal and team workspaces. Workspaces are the core of the user experience with Oracle Beehive, especially in regard to the collaborative activities of teams. Therefore, the Workspace Service is responsible for consolidating and exposing, in a single location, the collaborative functionality provided by the other Oracle Beehive applications, including the E-mail application, the Time Management application, the Instant Message application, the Discussions application, the Meetings application, the Voicemail application, the Search application, and so on.

XMPP Application and XMPP Application Instance – Oracle Beehive XMPP application supports all aspects of XMPP for Oracle Beehive including support for XMPP 0.9 and 1.0.

Discovering Oracle Beehive Sites

Enterprise Manager can discover Oracle Beehive sites from remote as well as local agents. Local agents could be used to monitor application instances. Oracle Beehive site, application and application instances discovery, monitoring and configuration parameter collections use the JMX interface exposed by Oracle Beehive's BEEMGMT OC4J. All Oracle Beehive application instances are grouped under the corresponding Oracle Beehive application type. For example, all E-mail application instances will be grouped under a single E-mail application.

To add new Oracle Beehive targets to be monitored by Grid Control, you will need to initiate the discovery process for each Oracle Beehive site.

Oracle Beehive Site Home Page

The Oracle Beehive Site Home page provides information about:

All Oracle Beehive applications and application instances within the Oracle Beehive site

Current Status, Availability, and Site Version

Site usage for commonly used Oracle Beehive Services including CalDAV, WebDAV, E-mail (IMAP), and XMPP

Configuring Systems and Services

Accessing System and Services dashboards for snapshots of the system and service-related information

Drill-downs to view monitoring metrics and configuration for each Oracle Beehive application and application instance

Alerts and diagnostic drill-downs so you can identify and resolve problems quickly

You can filter the view based on Physical or Application Deployment of Oracle Beehive. Application Deployment refers to the Oracle Beehive services deployed in an Oracle Beehive site. There can be multiple instances of Oracle Beehive services deployed within one or more OC4J containers. You can further filter the Application Deployment view by applications. Physical Deployment view shows the hosts, Oracle Application Servers, HTTP servers, OC4Js, and the database comprising an Oracle Beehive site. You can further filter this view based on the host, database, or platform components.

If the Oracle Beehive System and Services have not been created, you can create them by configuring the service tests for the Oracle Beehive Site.

Once the Oracle Beehive System and Services is configured, you can view snapshots of the service and system related information from the service and system dashboards on the Oracle Beehive Site home page. For more information about Oracle Beehive System and Services, see "Oracle Beehive System and Services". For information about Systems and Services in Enterprise Manager, see Chapter 6, "Service Management".

Rediscovering an Oracle Beehive Site

Enterprise Manager allows you to rediscover an Oracle Beehive site and its sub-components. During rediscovery, all sub-components of Oracle Beehive are compared. Rediscovery of Oracle Beehive includes addition of new Oracle Beehive targets, deletion of Oracle Beehive targets, or changing the configuration of existing Oracle Beehive targets.

Note:

Ensure that you have the necessary privileges to create, delete, and view targets.

Oracle Beehive System and Services

Since Oracle Beehive offers a set of complex and critical applications and services, it is very important for IT organizations to monitor and manage them for availability and performance. Enterprise Manager Oracle Beehive Site Systems and Services help you to effectively manage Oracle Beehive services from the overview level to the individual component level. Using Grid Control, you can identify and map service unavailability and performance degradation to one or more component failures. Grid Control not only monitors individual components in Oracle Beehive deployments such as hosts, databases, OC4Js, application servers, Beehive Site, Beehive application instances (for example, E-mail application instances, Instant Messaging application instances), etc., but also the applications hosted by those components, allowing you to monitor critical applications using the top down approach and from end-user perspective.

A "Service" in Enterprise Manager is defined as an entity that provides a useful function to its users. It models a business process or application, such as e-mail, time management, instant messaging, and so on. A "System" is a group of underlying components, such as hosts, databases, OC4Js, application servers, etc., on which the Service runs. A "Service test" is a functional test that is run against a service to determine the availability and performance of a service. For example, an IMAP Service test would determine the availability and performance of the E-mail service accessed via standard IMAP protocol. Availability of a service is a measure of the end-users' ability to access the service at a given point in time. Performance indicates the response time as experienced by the end-users. For information about Services and Systems, see the Service Management and System Management chapters in this guide.

Following is the complete Services hierarchy included in the model template. The hierarchy shown in the wizard is subject to the Oracle Beehive applications deployment. For example, if there is no FTP application discovered during Oracle Beehive Site discovery, the wizard will not include FTP Service in the hierarchy.

Beehive Site Service

Email Service

IMAP Service

SMTP Service

Time Management Service

CalDAV Service

Presence and IM Service

XMPP Service

Conferencing Service

Mobile Service

Mobile Mail Service

Client Service

Zimbra Service

WebDAV Service

FTP Service

Voice Message Service

Workspaces Service

User Directory Service

Following is the complete Systems hierarchy included in the model template:

Beehive Site System

Core System

Email System

Time Management System

Presence and IM System

Conferencing System

Mobile System

WebDAV System

FTP System

Voice Message System

Workspaces System

User Directory System

Based on the System and Services hierarchy configured through the wizard, an Oracle Beehive Site Service dashboard and an Oracle Beehive Site System dashboard will be automatically generated.

Note:

The Core System will be created only if there are agents monitoring the Oracle Beehive hosts, Oracle application servers, OC4Js, databases, LDAP servers, and so on.

For information about Oracle Beehive service dashboard metrics, see Appendix A.

Automated Oracle Beehive Monitoring and Alerts

Enterprise Manager automatically gathers and evaluates diagnostic information from Oracle Beehive targets distributed across the enterprise. As with all targets managed by Enterprise Manager, an extensive number of Oracle Beehive performance metrics are automatically monitored against predefined thresholds. Alerts are generated in Grid Control when metrics exceed these thresholds.